"I've managed to bring the backlog down to a mere sixty-eight years," she announced with some small sense of achievement. "I hope to be able to start marking the papers of pupils who are still alive by the end of the decade."
"A very worthy aim," I replied, thinking carefully about how I could apply queuing theory in this instance. "Excuse the impertinence, but wouldn't it be better to reverse the queuing order so that the oldest papers were last marked? It would allow pupils to know their results sooner, and as far as I can see, would not be against the Rules, since queue direction is not specified."
She stared at me oddly, then smiled kindly after having given the matter no thought at all.
— Jasper Fforde, Shades of Grey
I, on the other hand, have been giving a lot of thought to the matter of why I'm keeping this log of my tea experiences. I've even gone so far as to bounce some ideas around with my Life Coach, Christina. I leapt into tea blogging with the idea that, so doing, I could provide a unique (ha!) and useful tool for others: a forum in which people could discover new teas, a resource full of new tea-related information, and — if I got it right — even a point around which a community could coalesce.
(fast forward twelve minutes)
Well, I couldn't help but notice that my tea blog is one of approximately three brazilian, and that my tea knowledge is (happily) vastly outstripped by many other members of my new, already well-coalesced community. So, I'm less and less convinced it will be you, my dear reader, to whom this blog is useful. If there is someone to whom it will be useful, I believe that someone will be me.
And that, in itself, is a good thing — the blogging equivalent of "Live the Change." (Or something.) My problem, rather, is one of outlook: I have trouble believing that "useful to me" is sufficient justification to undertake a project. (We won't even get into the value proposition of "fun for me"...)
This attitude has stoked my perfectionism, which, in turn, has brought my procrastination to a rolling boil. That is to say, I have a huge backlog of entries floating around, and it's time for me to pour the juice out before it stews bitter and undrinkable in the old noggin, to extend a metaphor perhaps several steps too far.
So, this is where I'm at. This is my pencil-lead line on Grandma's kitchen door jamb. I'm sure future me is already impressed at how much I've grown.
With all that in mind, present-day me is putting the non-metaphorical kettle on the hob, firing up the laptop, and getting ready to walk the well worn path of the ancients: thinking about, writing about, drinking... tea.
To myself I say, "Enjoy!"
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